To date, research on racial identity formation among youth in school context has neglected discussion and analysis of whiteness as a racialized identity production. Through qualitative, ethnographic methods of data collection, this discussion directs attention to the social construction of white racial identity among a group of adolescent girls attending a largely white, historically elite, private, independent, single-sex high school. Their voices provide insight into the ways in which liberal discourses work to position youth, and how white youth, in turn, actively remake themselves in relation to prevailing meanings and practices institutionalized in a largely white, upper-middle-class school setting. The study examines the intersections of race and class discourses in private school culture as they combine to create the conditions for meaning-making.
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